Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has been quite popular and is being widely used. However, lack of appropriate methodology for rating nonnative English speakers’ essays has meant a lopsided advancement in this field. In this paper, we report initial results of our experiments with nonnative AES that learns from manual evaluation of nonnative essays. For this purpose, we conducted an exercise in wh...

In this issue, 12 essays to honor the life and achievements of Art Winfree, a friend and mentor to all of us, and father to one, are collected. The essays vary from personal reminiscences to opinionated reviews to original research articles. Some essays deal with problems derived directly from Art’s own work; others with problems that surely would have captured his attention and critical scruti...

This paper presents a novel approach to question answering: the use of argumentation techniques. Our question answering system deals with argumentation in student essays: it sees an essay as an answer to a question and gauges its quality on the basis of the argumentation found in it. Thus, the system looks for expected types of argumentation in essays (i.e. the expectation is that the kind of a...

Let $G$ be a group with identity $e$ and $R$ be a commutative $G$-graded ring with nonzero unity $1$. In this article, we introduce the concept of graded $r$-ideals. A proper graded ideal $P$ of a graded ring $R$ is said to be graded $r$-ideal if whenever $a, bin h(R)$ such that $abin P$ and $Ann(a)={0}$, then $bin P$. We study and investigate the behavior of graded $r$-ideals to introduce ...

Parallelism is an important rhetorical device. We propose a machine learning approach for automated sentence parallelism identification in student essays. We build an essay dataset with sentence level parallelism annotated. We derive features by combining generalized word alignment strategies and the alignment measures between word sequences. The experimental results show that sentence parallel...

This paper discusses the development of writing skills of Dutch students of English and Spanish as foreign languages. Essays written in three consecutive years were analyzed for essay length, word length, and type/token ratio — reflecting linguistic competence. A selection of essays was analyzed for argument structure and the use of cohesive devices. These same essays were ranked holistically b...

Essay stance classification, the task of determining how much an essay’s author agrees with a given proposition, is an important yet under-investigated subtask in understanding an argumentative essay’s overall content. We introduce a new corpus of argumentative student essays annotated with stance information and propose a computational model for automatically predicting essay stance. In an eva...

This study tested the lower boundary of the dosage required to garner health benefits from written emotional expression. Participants wrote about either a personal trauma, a positive life experience, or a control topic for 2 minutes each day for 2 days. Emotion word usage in the essays was examined and physical health complaints were measured 4-6 weeks after the last writing session. Trauma and...

We investigate how writing proficiency relates to the flexible use of cohesion. Forty-five students wrote 16 essays across 8 sessions. Natural language processing techniques were used to calculate the cohesion of each essay. Random walk and Euclidian distance measures were then used to visualize and classify students’ flexibility in cohesion across the essays. Results revealed that students who...

In October 1987 an international symposium was held at Princeton Theological Seminary on the general topic of "Judaism and Christian Origins" and with the specific theme of messianism. The papers arising from the conference have now been published under the editorship of James H. Charlesworth, who also acted as chairman of the steering committee for the conference. The result is a major collect...